Month: March 2008

Some of the dimmer lights in the blogosphere aren’t quite understanding the concept of oversampling for subgroups as NBC/WSJ did for the African-American sample in their latest poll.

It’s fairly simple. There is a general sample of 700 respondents with 11% African-American and 75% White respondents. Looking at their subsamples, there are 520 white respondents which is approximately 75% of the whole sample. If you read what the WSJ and Chuck Todd say is that they added 100 African-American respondents to the crosstabs–or the breakdowns by race. This means that in the general sample there are 77 African-Americans and in the smaller African-American sample there are 177 African Americans.

Before trying to discredit the poll or acting all outraged, do the math. All one needs is a basic understanding of percentages.

Furthermore, Taylor Marsh is very upset that the poll includes Republicans. I kid you not. She might read the poll results with questions from the article she linked to and notice that it only includes Democrats and likely Democratic primary voters if they identify themselves that way. But shiiiiiiiiittttt, we’d hate to read the damn thing and know something about what we are talking about.

This blog is older than the Iraq War so, unfortunately for me, if you go back to that time I was in favor of this godforsaken war. I really have no excuses. The only one I ever tried after figuring out how stupid I was really that dumb, was that I figured even the Bush administration couldn’t be that wrong. Austin Mayor then pointed out to me that they have been unsuccessful at everything they have ever tried except making Democrats wet their pants. Point taken. I have no excuse.

As expected, one of the two major Democratic candidates saw a downturn in the latest NBC/WSJ poll, but it’s not the candidate that you think. Hillary Clinton is sporting the lowest personal ratings of the campaign. Moreover, her 37 percent positive rating is the lowest the NBC/WSJ poll has recorded since March 2001, two months after she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York.

Here’s one of the most basic rules of campaigning. Negative campaigning hurts your opponent, but it also hurts you. Your hope is that it hurts your opponent more, but there is one big problem for some candidates. If your unfavorability is already higher, your unfavorability might drop enough so the other candidate still stays on top. I e-mailed this to a friend probably a month ago in saying how she couldn’t go too negative. Of course, she can go that negative, it’s just not going to help her win.

Congratulations Clinton camp–you screwed yourselves and the party.

For those ranting about new polling showing Obama falling in some states, both are falling and will continue to fall as long as this crap continues.

What’s stunning to me is that as many of us have spent time trying to point out that a big portion of the right wing noise machine is not credible and shouldn’t set the agenda after watching the Clinton’s get cut up by it for 8 years, Clinton is now embracing those sources as reasonable sources to work though:

In the early 1960s, at a time when many young people were being radicalized by the Vietnam War, Wright left college and volunteered to join the United States Marine Corps. After three years as a marine, he chose to serve three more as a naval medical technician, during which time he received several White House commendations. He came to Chicago to study not long after Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in 1968, the U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia in 1969, and the shooting of students at Kent State University in 1970.

Read the whole thing as they say. I understand white fear of angry black men, but I don’t understand the refusal to look more deeply at ministry of a man who is so well regarded within the religious community.

Because a day that celebrates the resurrection of Christ who was put to death by bleeding him to death with the giant stakes driven through his hands and feet is a day that shouldn’t include any talk about persecution.

Until the last couple of years, which now finds me meditating on Easter Sunday, I never in my entire life have heard anyone mention “lynching” on Easter Sunday. I’ve spent a few Easters inside a Baptist church as well.

Yeah, because lynching is so seldom mentioned in sermons at black churches. I know people are pretty clueless about black churches—okay African-Americans in general, but this is perhaps the stupidest fucking complaint ever.

It strikes me that Easter is a perfect day to talk about lynching if one thinks that Jesus was sacrificed for our sins.

Despite the years of criticism of the mainstream media, they fall into the trap of accepting sound bites overcontext. When one listens to the comments in context, one finds Wright is not Anti-American, he is anti-Bush and anti-Conservative. I thought Jerome and Taylor were of similar mind. And Wright argues that violence begets violence in context. That is certainly a message one should hear in their Church.

Response to a woman who called out to him: “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!” during his 1956 campaign, as quoted in Anatomy of the Cuban Missile Crisis (2001) by James A. Nathan, p. 156

Hurckes, a man of no small ego, is not merely Dan Lipinski’s chief of staff, earning $107,224. Nor also just a paid consultant to Bill Lipinski’s dubious foundation, the All American Eagles, which brags about helping kids but mostly helps fund friendly candidates.

Hurckes also is a trustee of Oak Lawn, southwest of Chicago, and an aspiring mayoral candidate.

And so, he likes to brag, he’s the guy who’s bringing home the bacon to Oak Lawn. As the suburban SouthtownStar newspaper and Roll Call reported this month, Hurckes was not a happy camper when some of his fellow trustees entertained the notion of hiring a Washington lobbyist to attract federal dollars to Oak Lawn.

“Repeatedly using the phrase ‘It is I who’ to preface his accomplishments,” reported Roll Call, “Hurckes ticked off earmarks he claimed to have secured for the village. . . . $100,000 for the Oak Lawn Children’s Museum, nearly $4 million in transportation infrastructure funds.” Hurckes, self-important if not always grammatical, added, “It was I that brought . . . the Army Corps of Engineers.”

Heavens, why would Oak Lawn need a lobbyist when it’s got Jerry Hurckes? For that matter, why would the 3rd District need Dan Lipinski when Hurckes is clearly the go-to guy?

So, Bean has natural reasons to support the Serbian position and receive money from Serbian Americans.

Swami takes no side for now on the ancient, underlying dispute, but he does find it reprehensible that Greenberg calls out Bean this way: “Congresswoman Melissa Bean is flagrantly working on behalf of foreign interests, against the interests of the United States. This is an outrage and today I am asking for an investigation of Ms. Bean’s activities as an agent for a foreign government.”

When you call a sitting U.S. congresswoman an agent of foreign powers, that tends to get attention.

Swami’s view? This as a temper tantrum by an inexperienced candidate who now senses he’s not going to win the election and is casting about in the dark for any rock to throw. Desperation can be ugly.

His is a spiteful position, rife with cultural undertones and barely veiled hate talk. Remember the price for inheriting the wind.

And it doesn’t help Greenberg that some of the leading conservative political practitioners are on the other side of the Serb-Kosovo issue. Greenberg hasn’t called Lawrence Eagleburger a Serbian terror patsy, yet.

If Greenberg wants to debate Bean on the issue of which side in a 16-century-old conflagration is right, Swami says be our guest.

But calling someone a traitor just because they disagree with your position is a low and unbecoming tactic and, more to the point, it doesn’t positively distinguish a person seeking to sit in Congress.

Change Serbian to Jewish or Israeli and see what happens when you make claims like this (rightfully so). Balkan policy seldom has easy answers and there is nothing wrong with a debate about the policy. Now, if the good Mr. Greenberg would like to explain to Peter Roskam why he is un-American, it’s time for him to STFU.